Brooke: Show and Tell

I really like this Christmas Greeting by E.B. White:

From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air–the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

Scott: Philip

Philip tied the final chord of the rabbit trap to his bed-post. Being the man of the house, all matters of extermination fell on him. He knew the chances of this twelve-part Rube Goldberg machine actually capturing the thing were slim but he didn’t care. His mom and sister’s incessant griping had finally gotten to him and, although doomed to failure, he knew his busyness would at least calm the two.

He learned from many years of working in the grocery store owned by his grandpa on the bottom floor of their building, that the appearance of busyness is more valuable than actual results. Besides, it was most likely this animal was the pet of a child in the building who, after over-hearing Mom’s furious anti-rabbitical rantings, decided against putting up a “Lost Rabbit” poster.

Gazing with pride on his creation, Philip considered adding Engineering as a third minor to his ever-expanding degree at Winsmere College. He was currently a Philosophy Major with a double-minor in English Literature and Psychology and had acquired twelve credits in the past three years.

The rabbit’s entry into the kitchen would tug a chord which would pull a helium balloon out from under a baby chair that hadn’t been used since his sister was a toddler – a constant reminder that their mom had not yet given up on remarrying and having more rabbit-catchers. The balloon would pop on a tack taped to the ceiling, rendering the chord resistance-less and thus letting the wound-up race car toy on the other end peel out across the floor. After nine more triggered reactions involving eggs, dominoes, a pair of spectacles, sunlight, hairspray, a ten pound lifting weight, velcro, and a gas lighter, the victim would be quite trapped under a tupperware container.

Of course what actually happened was the rabbit, upon hearing the balloon pop, raced out of the room just in time to send Philip’s mom screaming into the kitchen where she was met by two flying eggs that hit her stomach and splattered all over her bare feet.

He didn’t need to see her yolkey feet to know what had happened. It looked like the yolks of her eyes had cracked. It was a face she only gave to him. After years of yelling to no avail, Maggy Edith-Dodger would now let her helplessness build up tears in her eyes and masterfully wield the cutting blade of guilt.

To be continued…

Brooke: Why it is good, that laundry isn’t sharp.

An intriguing study of phone calling behaviors and the various degrees of correlating peril:

You see, many times a person will use a telephone, but also desire to do another thing at the same time that they are using this device. This is called multi-tasking, and it is generally a good idea for maximizing time and efficiency in one’s life. To multi-task while on the phone you simply must cradle the phone between your ear and neck, thus freeing up both your hands to do whatever it is you desire with them.

However, according to scientific study–there are certain tasks that are more desirable to undertake during a phone call than others. A simple equation has been drawn up to explain this phenomena. The equation is as follows: XXX < x

Or in simpler terms: The less peril involved, the more desirable the task.

Two specific tasks will now be presented as examples:

Task number one is apple-cutting. Apple-cutting might seem like a good multi-tasking idea while on the phone. After all, apples are a delicious and wholesome snack–and if you are in for a long conversation you might need the nutrition to keep up your stamina. However, apple-cutting not only requires an APPLE, but a KNIFE. And knives are sharp.

According to scientific research people who attempt to cut an apple while talking on the phone, will cut, slash, impale or otherwise injure themselves 9 times out of 10. Therefore, it is evident that the combination of apple-cutting and phone-talking is quite perilous, and therefore rather undesirable.

Task number two is laundry-folding. Laundry-folding, while somewhat difficult to undertake while one’s head is plastered to one’s shoulder, is significantly less perilous than apple-cutting and can be done in a safe and efficient manner even while having the most uproarious of conversations. The quality of the folded laundry might not be quite as good as laundry that is folded while not on the phone–but the results are passable and there is no risk of injury involved.

That is why, scientifically, it is good that laundry isn’t sharp.

Thank you.

(PS maybe you can tell I was pressed for time today, and could not think of many worthwhile things to say…)

Scott: The Harper Place

Martha caught a long glimpse of the rabbit that had been menacing their apartment complex for the passed several weeks and let out a sigh of frustration. She was sick of her brother’s constant hypothesizing as to the significance of the white rabbit as a symbol. It was insignificant, she had tried to convince him.

But for something as insignificant as a rabbit, it sure was making life hard on the third floor of Red Butte Building 27. It had an unhampered appetite for wallpaper.

“The property value of this place has gone down enough since they made the Harper Place into a Looney Bin. The last thing we need is holy walls.” Mom was known to remind them regularly.

Bob Harper had been a strange character for as long as they had known him before his death several years ago. He had no wife or kids and rarely left his front door. If he did come out to check the mail or smoke a cigarette he always wore a different get-up. These rare appearances did not seem that of someone who was afraid of the outside world at all but more like performances. He often spoke with a fake accent and would spend several hours introducing himself to passersby as a different character, only to vanish again for several more months.

The house had seemed to sag with the weight of over-grown weeds. It now looked like a bum on whom someone took pity and gave a gentlemanly makeover; grinning with a kind of awkward clean.

Mister Harper left all of his money to a private organization that provides counseling and sanctuary to the mentally disturbed. The white-coats came in three waves; first the landscapers, then the doctors, then the patients.

Mom failed to see the irony in a building being refurbished lowering the property value of the local establishments. All she saw were more Bob Harpers and it made her feel dirty.

To be continued…

Brooke: A Transcendental Meditation on Shapes and Puzzle Pieces

We are an unlikely bunch of scholars—a ragtag team of college freshman, brought together weekly by our mutual love for Emerson. Though we are young and utterly untrained, there is something about our weekly rendezvous that makes us all feel like we are doing something important. It is a very introspective, thought-provoking hour. There is not much action involved at our meetings, but we read important things, say important things, and every once in a while…we come to important conclusions about life.
Emerson has helped us all to live more deliberately—to never let life passively wash over us, but to embrace every moment. This is a difficult thing, but I am glad to have a semi-weekly reminder of these ideas and ideals that I someday wish to embrace constantly.

In an effort to better record and remember our discussions, I have decided to write out a few of the items we discussed this past week.

Throughout all Emersonian discourse there tends to be this underlying idea that the mind is what contains all ultimate reality. People are foolish to believe that physical constructs and material goods are anything resembling definitive truth. There is this idea that people should not take these things for granted. They should not subject themselves to anything out of mere tradition or habit, but find the ultimate truth within them and obey only that.
In one essay Emerson even takes it so far as to say a person should not “not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind.”
As a group we looked at this concept critically, and from a gospel perspective. What I was most concerned about regarding this line of thought was that it could be interpreted to mean that truth is subjective. There is the idea that if everyone searched within themselves for their own personal truth, everyone might find a different form, and then live their life according to their own personal concept. This would result in a disharmonious and clashing reality where anyone could be justified in any action so long as it satisfied their personal concept of truth or reiterated the unique “law of their mind.”

However, there is a truer and better message to be found within these ideas, and they need not be discarded so quickly. Paired with the idea of searching within for reality and truth, is the idea that there does exist a greater force guiding all things and that there is a predestined harmony to all things. Emerson does not always call this God in his writings—but that is what I know it to be. When predestined harmony comes into play, an ultimate truth and light to be found, the concept suddenly shifts from being something chaotic and troublesome to something altogether beautiful.

You see the first idea would look something like this:

People would look inside themselves and all find different shapes to the truth. And these shapes would not work together but collide and crash in a noisy, disruptive way. Lets call this war and contention and murder and thieving and every kind of conflict and unhappiness that exists in the world. All of this is caused because people are operating on all sorts of different planes and falsely embracing different disharmonious elements as their truth. They live passively and sensuously and accept flawed constructs of truth as their reality.

The second idea would look like this:

Everyone can and should seek out the truth within, and everyone who successfully does this will find a unique manifestation within themselves, but at the same time it all fits into a greater fabric—a giant puzzle. Everyone’s unique part fits harmoniously and beautifully with everyone else’s. Creativity, diversity, the beautiful individuality of each person can still be maintained even when all people embrace what I call “the light of Christ” within them.

Brooke’s Punishment!

Choose one of the following.

-Make a video-collage of at least seven people screaming like they’re in a cheesy horror film.

-Eat a spaghetti dinner with your hands tied behind your back.

-Collect as much lint as you can from the laundry room, make some kind of article of clothing out of it and give it to a stranger while only speaking Spanish.

-Make a chess set where all the pieces are action figures (you can probably buy them from DI).

Show and Tell!

Aaaah! I forgot about Show and Tell! I was having a splendid time at the University of Utah Student Film Festival.

Anyway, I hope it’s not too late. Here’s an amazing short story I found.

In February I went to see the Gossip and Young People with a friend of mine named Steve, who had just gotten out of rehab, and who was wrestling with the soft, quasi-religious rhetoric of AA in order to control a very real and threatening addiction to alcohol that had made a hard friend of him in the past. He was nervous and reserved on the ride out to the club, wholly unlike the person I knew before, who spent his nights at rock shows, perpetually wasted, hooting and heckling between every song, making out with random people, breakdancing. I was relieved, at first, by his change in demeanor; I prefer to enjoy my rock with as little peripheral, unpredictable activity as possible, and Old Steve made this impossible.We got to the show just as Young People were starting up, playing to a nearly empty club. Their latest record, War Prayers, is a collection of tense, semi-spastic hymns, as if performed by Patsy Cline, Thurston Moore, and the ghost of a Baptist preacher. Live, the songs took on a new urgency. Steve was impressed. When the first song ended, he shouted, “I like Young People! Bring the Rock!” again and again, pumping his fist like a trucker. The words sailed haltingly and erratically from his mouth—there was something forced in his delivery, like something synthetic and angular was lodged deep in his throat. He seemed interested in discovering whether he could still act up without being wasted, and, finding that he couldn’t, at least not with the same offhanded fluidity, he became frustrated and sad. He looked like he’d lost his arms, or the ability to smell. A couple people turned around, giving him a look. I felt the old conflict rising up in me. I wanted to defend his enthusiasm, the tireless work he did for rock, but I also wanted to hide behind the soundboard until the end of the show, or maybe the end of the decade. I mean, the rest of us had come to dutifully endure the show in respectful silence, arms crossed over our chests or thrust into the pockets of our thrifted coats. Even in the darkness of the club, there were limits.At the end of their set, Young People vocalist Katie Eastburn announced that it was Gossip singer Beth Ditto’s birthday, and that we should all wish her well when they took the stage. Steve and I went down the street to a Dunkin’ Donuts to wait for the Gossip.We sat for a long time. Steve seemed distracted and fidgety. He kept staring at the brightly lit menu panel that hung behind the registers, working something out inside his head.

“We have to get Beth something for her birthday,” he said, finally. “We need to get her a muffin.”

“No, I said, “Let’s not get her a muffin.”

“Yes,” he said. “We are going to get her a muffin. We’re going to find a candle and stick it in the muffin, and we’re going to give it to her for her birthday.”

I didn’t think it was a good idea. This was someone we didn’t know, and what kind of gift is a muffin, anyway? I talked him down, but he was determined. He started fishing through his pockets for a makeshift present, but all he had was a Connecticut quarter and his AA meeting schedule. Again, I was relieved. I get anxious during ATM transactions, so the thought of having to confront the singer of an amazing band with a pocket-warmed cigarette lighter or a pack of gum or a sobriety token was pretty crippling. Then Steve saw the 7-11 across the street. “Can I borrow five dollars?” he asked.

“Don’t do this,” I said.

“Just give me the money,” he said. “You owe me anyway for that mix CD I haven’t made for you yet.”

I gave him the money and he went across the street, returning five minutes later with a birthday card and a four-color click pen. “Check it out, I already got the cashier to sign it,” he said, sliding the card across the table. The front had a picture of a startled twelve-point buck emerging from a stand of trees, and across the top it said “Birthday Wishes for Father,” but Steve had crossed out “Father” and written “Beth” in the margin. Inside was an inspirational poem for ” Father Beth.” And, sure enough, in wild, green letters, Vikesh, the 7-11 clerk, had written, “To Beth—Many happy returns to you on this special day.”

“What is this?” I said.

“We’re going to take this into the club and get everyone to sign the card, and then we’re going to give it to Beth.”

“No, you are going to go into the club and get everyone to sign it.”

“Don’t be a wuss,” he said. “Put on your sissy parka and let’s do this.”

When we got back to the club it was packed. Before I had a chance to convince him that it was a bad, bad idea, Steve was already petitioning a group of lesbians. “Hey, it’s Beth’s birthday,” he said, suggesting a casual familiarity with the band. One of them asked who Beth was. He issued a brief sigh and explained that she was, like, the singer for the Gossip? As if, how could this person not even know that?

I shadowed him for a while like a waiter in training at Applebee’s, but I eventually backed off. I wasn’t really adding any value, after all, and there was an open space behind a heavy column next to the bar, where I could lean safely and inconspicuously.

Steve disappeared into the crowd, and I didn’t see him again until the Gossip came on stage. From across the club, I could hear him start to holler like a backwoods moonshine peddler chasing off trespassers. I stood on tip-toes and saw his hand, like a shark’s fin slicing through the water’s surface, gripping the card above everybody’s heads as he struggled toward the stage. He surged to the front and handed the card to Beth, who became, in turn, confused, surprised, and speechless with appreciation. The crowd, a good deal of whom had signed the card, was shouting and caterwauling like the apes from 2001. Beth stammered a thank-you (what do you say to a roomful of strangers who have just handed you a demented birthday card?), and the band started in with “Fire/Sign” off their Movement LP, a thimble-sized masterpiece of gritty white soul with a title that, as far as I can tell, is meant to describe what happens to the hairs on the back of your neck when you hear Ditto’s searing, boundlessly emotive voice for the first time. Everything that followed was a furious, sweaty blur. I’m sure the show would have been great even without the birthday card—the Gossip doesn’t need any help stirring up a room—but Steve’s impulsive, fledgling concept, his attempt to prove to himself that he hadn’t, in recovery, destroyed the very faculty that had made life worth it before, made us all feel like we’d done something important and pure, even if all we did was stand by and watch. We felt like we’d knowingly come to the show to celebrate Beth’s birthday, like we’d carefully orchestrated the whole night, calling each other weeks in advance to make sure everything would work out the way we’d planned. But it wasn’t planned—it was just a pattern that formed in Steve’s head, a fleeting opportunity he seized before it disappeared down the hole where we dump our squandered ideas. And its execution provoked, in real time, that sweet, triumphant, chest-bursting joy that any great song generates inside us.

Today is the first day we will be implementing Show and Tell Wednesdays!

We wanted to keep the blog project active on ALL weekdays, so Wednesday is now the day in which we will have little “show and tell” sessions. Instead of posting original creative works, we will post links to, or excerpts from things we have read, seen, or heard recently that are of particular interest.

As my first contribution to Show and Tell Wednesdays I will post a link to a very interesting and thought-provoking short story I read recently called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

The author took her ideas from a quote by William James:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which…utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

PS–How do you like the awesome header graphic I created for Show and Tell Wednesdays?

Scott: Gantz Yum Avi!

A few nights ago, sickened by my own lack of initiative, I scribbled down on a post-it note a schedule for the next day’s activities.

It was to be the perfect day. I would wake up at 6:30, after exactly six and a half hours of sleep, catch the shuttle down to my 7:30 math class after which I planned to go to the Institute building and sleep for another hour and a half, thus polishing off my doctor-recommended eight-hour sleep quota. The rest of the day’s scheduled activities involved exercise, scripture study, getting a card to use TRAX, taking TRAX downtown and applying for a job my friend tipped me off to, finally talking to that film department adviser whose office I had been circling for days, among other fulfilling agenda items.

I had been feeling quite daunted by this huge, man-eating city known as Salt Lake. I swore the broad streets were purposefully pedestrian proof; with arbitrarily vanishing sidewalks that point out to all passing motorists that I must not know where I’m going because the ground on which I walk is asphalt, not concrete.

True story: it took me three days of helpless wandering to find where I could buy some shampoo.

But this day was different. I had a master plan and would be relying on pure spunk to see me to the end of the day conqueror!

Well… I met my sleep quota, but that was about all that got done.

After my math class I reached in my back pocket for the “master plan” to discover it was missing.

I made it to my Institute class but was afterwards attacked by a nap-monster, and we all know how overpowering those can be.

“It’s okay, shake it off,” I told myself. “There are battles this day yet to be won!” I confidently walked up the stairs of the film department, ready to charm my way onto a production crew, when I found a glitch in the matrix. The office number 357, where the film department advisor was supposed to be located, simply did not exist. It went from room 356, right to room 358! Apparently, I thought to myself, they had adopted a Mongolian system of organization.

But alas, there were still mountains to be scaled!

It took a while for me to find the awkwardly-placed bus stop that would take me downtown. I walked on more asphalt and even had to hop a few fences but I finally made it just as the bus pulled in and opened its gaping mouth with a snort.

It didn’t take me long to notice that we were going absolutely the wrong way and instead of embarrassing the bus-driver by informing him I decided to get off and walk the block back up to campus.

I sat on a bench freezing cold and feeling thoroughly defeated. I waited for that familiar wave of depression but instead felt my blood asking politely for some caffeine.

“Gantz yum avi!”

Without thinking, the familiar words I had often used during my two-year stay in Mongolia, escaped my mouth. Translated literally it means “I’ll take just one thing.” In context, it is a term one of my closest mission buddies taught me is what alcoholics say when they need a shot of whisky.

I purchased a 20-ounce Coke and sat in front of the library. The City and I stared each other down. I took a swig of my elixir and chuckled to myself.

Failure! … or is it negotiable?

Okay, so according to my computer clock I have now, technically, failed by 9 minutes.

I completely got carried away in Martin Luther King Jr Day festivities, and was occupied until about 5 minutes ago when I rushed back to my apartment and discovered I had no time left to construct a post.

This, as stated in the rules outlined, is a punishable offense. And I will, if it is deemed necessary and just, submit myself to punishment.

HOWEVER! I will say this–in my defense. In the rules I wrote up I did say we must post every day except for holidays. Martin Luther King Day is technically a federal holiday. And I did technically fail to post because of my observance of this holiday (I was at a MLK/Civil Rights party!)

So, I will now leave my fate in the hands of my siblings (Aaron, you help Scott be the judge). Please be merciful!

Most sincerely,

Brooke